


Just Like in the Books

by Lauren (notalwaysweak)



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, The Big Bang Theory (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-29
Updated: 2014-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-15 06:16:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2218887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sheldon gets kidnapped by a dragon. Amy comes to his rescue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Like in the Books

**Author's Note:**

  * For [debirlfan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/debirlfan/gifts).



> TBBT characters do not belong to me and I am making no financial profit off this work of fan fiction (still working on the formula to transmute kudos into gold).
> 
> * * *

You _could_ say that this story started once upon a time, but that would be terribly imprecise, and imprecision when dealing with physicists is just begging for trouble. It was at 5.53 PM on a Thursday evening. The Thursday in question was the third Thursday of the month, making it Anything Can Happen Thursday, which happened to coincide with Date Night for one Sheldon Cooper, the physicist prince of this tale. (Although he would probably be quite offended to be referred to merely as a “prince” outside of specific contexts, and prefer the title “physicist non-denominational deity”.)

So. 5.53 PM. Or rather, by now, 5.55 PM, according to Sheldon’s frequently checked watch. And this was not in a land far, far away, but rather in Sheldon’s fourth floor apartment in Pasadena, California, where he was awaiting the arrival of his girlfriend.

It wasn’t that Amy was late. Their agreed meeting time was 6 PM. But it _was_ unusual that she hadn’t arrived early to call on Penny before proceeding to Sheldon’s for Date Night. Sheldon had become accustomed to hearing the door across the hall open and close and the hum of feminine voices undergoing the all-important pre-date discussion before Amy finally made an appearance on his doorstep, or at least on the patch of carpet immediately outside the apartment’s front door, which was the closest approximation. For that matter, he usually heard her in the stairwell, which was _practically_ his front doorstep.

5.57. Sheldon heard a flurry of knocking, but not at either his door or Penny’s. It was coming from the living room window. He moved away from where he had decidedly not been pacing impatiently by the couch and twitched the drapes aside expecting to see a confused bird attacking its own reflection.

There were wings. They were not bird wings. There were claws many times the size of eagle talons, and hot breath that disintegrated the window.

“Hello, Princess,” rumbled an unnervingly familiar voice.

* * *

Amy knocked on 4A’s door exactly three minutes later. When Sheldon didn’t answer, she tried the door. It opened. Amy stepped into the apartment, her boyfriend’s name on her lips.

Her casual greeting turned into a surprised shriek when she saw the melted glass, the blowing curtains, and the complete lack of Sheldon anywhere in the living room. It brought Penny across the hall at a run, and Leonard out of the bathroom with a towel hastily wrapped around his waist.

“What the hell?” Penny asked.

“Oh my God!” Leonard stared at the window with the expression of a man calculating a hefty repair bill in his head. “Amy, what _happened_?”

“You were here, why don’t _you_ know what happened?” Amy moved to touch the window but stopped; there was still heat rising off the molten glass, which had burned several holes in the carpet. “Sheldon!” she yelled into the night, with no response.

“It must have been someone with a blowtorch who rappelled down from the roof and broke in to kidnap Sheldon,” Leonard said. “I knew he was being courted by other colleges, but this is pretty extreme.”

“Or a dragon,” Penny said, crouching to pick something up from the charred carpet.

“Penny, for God’s sake–” Leonard started.

Amy hushed him with a wave of her hand as she looked at what Penny had found.

It was a scale. Like a goldfish scale, but with a dull bronze sheen. And it was the size of Penny’s palm.

“That’s impossible,” Leonard said.

“Maybe,” Penny said, “but put it together with the melted window, and a dragon makes more sense than a guy on a rope. Especially ‘cause there’s no rope out there, and I don’t smell acetylene.”

“How did you know blowtorches use acetylene?”

Penny looked irritated. “I grew up in Ne _bras_ ka, not Amish country.”

Amy took the scale from Penny’s hand. It was warm and, as she tilted it back and forth, examining the way that it gleamed, something about it struck her as familiar.

There was something else out of place as well. Usually Sheldon’s flags were kept neatly rolled in the coat cupboard behind the couch. But one of them was lying on the floor, as if Sheldon had dropped it there on his way to tape an episode of his vlog. Amy picked it up and shook it out to fold and roll it. The United Federation of Planets... that was familiar as well.

And then Amy put the pieces together.

“Sorry, guys,” she said to Leonard and Penny, who were just getting started on what promised to be a hell of an argument about the existence of dragons and whether or not Leonard’s rental insurance would cover acts of dragon. “I think I know where Sheldon is.” She draped the flag over the back of the couch and bolted out of the apartment.

* * *

Sheldon was profoundly unimpressed. His ribs ached where the dragon’s claw had squeezed him a little too tightly as it snatched him out of the apartment; even if he escaped _right now_ he was going to be at least twenty minutes late for Date Night; and also he’d been kidnapped by a creature that wasn’t supposed to exist.

“You won’t get away with this,” he tried anyway.

“Won’t I?” The dragon drooped one scaly eyelid in a wink. “Who’s going to believe you? ‘Yes, officer, I was taken prisoner by a dragon and he made me tell him everything I know about string theory’.”

Sheldon folded his arms. “Which I most certainly will not do!”

“Whatever. ‘Also, he called me “Princess” all the time.’”

“That’s just ridiculous.”

“Whatever you say, Princess.” The dragon showily jetted a little smoke from its nostrils and then tapped the wall with a claw. The entire wall was one giant blackboard, akin to something in one of Caltech’s older lecture theaters. In fact... Sheldon looked around. This _was_ one of Caltech’s older lecture theaters. The ghosts of equations past lingered on the board, and the desk that he’d been deposited on was ancient, battered wood.

The reason he hadn’t realized it immediately was that the dragon had ripped out all of the seats to make room for its immense body. Which, coincidentally, was blocking both doors. Sheldon looked up to the windows, which weren’t there, and came to the correct conclusion as to how the dragon entered and exited the lecture theater.

_ Screeee... _

Sheldon yelped as the sound seared straight through his eardrums to embed itself in his auditory processing centers.

The dragon blew chalk dust off one massive claw. “Start with your thoughts on supersymmetry, Princess. _Now_.”

* * *

“I could have had a wall of thorns, I could have had moats of fire and water and snakes, but no, I had to get _rush hour_.” Amy reached up to touch her tiara. It was firmly in place, which made her feel a lot better about the whole situation.

Her phone merrily jingled the opening bars of “Single Ladies”. In deference to Penny and Leonard’s renewed relationship, she was probably going to have to update that.

“Bestie, I’m driving.”

“Put me on speaker.”

“You _are_. I still don’t think it’s safe.”

Penny’s sigh was tinny through the phone. “I just wanted to be sure you knew where you were going. You ran out so fast…”

“I’m fine.” Amy caught a glimpse of her own face in the rear view mirror. She looked more determined than the time she’d pulled an all-nighter to isolate a specific set of neurons in a rat brain. By midnight she’d felt like she was going to turn into a pumpkin herself.

She didn’t feel like that this time.

“I’m fine,” she repeated, and her reflection gave her back a hard, unforgiving smile.

“Do you want us to come with you? We could probably catch up—”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t _worry_ about it? Ames, it’s a _dragon_.”

(“Possible dragon,” Leonard muttered in the background.)

“I can handle it.” Amy ended the call before Penny could insist on getting involved.

The roads that serviced the Caltech campus were a lot quieter than the main road. Amy parked in the spot that had been the subject of so much contention between the boys, and hit the ground running.

She wasn’t a hundred percent certain where her ultimate destination was, but first she needed to get to her laboratory.

* * *

“I don’t know what else to tell you.” Sheldon was standing uncomfortably close to the dragon’s head, wielding a stick of chalk and wishing it was something considerably more lethal. He could _possibly_ poke the dragon’s eye out with an eraser, but then it would still have another eye and also still be able to breathe fire. “There’s only so much I can explain without my notes.”

The dragon grinned. It was not a pleasant sight. It involved far too many teeth. The word “maw” came to mind. “I know that’s a lie, Princess. All the information you need is right there in your brain.” A claw tapped against the floor. “Do you need me to squeeze it and see what else comes out?”

“That would be counterintuitive.” Sheldon turned back to the blackboard. “All right. Given a boson with two units of—”

A shrill whine cut him off, and for a moment Sheldon thought that the dragon had scratched the board again. But then the lecture theatre door splintered down the center, and Sheldon caught a flash of spinning metal. The bone saw – for that was the source of the sound – rebounded off the dragon’s scaly hide, barely scratching it. But the needed damage was done: the door was open. Well, cut into several jagged chunks each removable with a single yank, but it was the same thing for all intents and purposes.

Amy, prudently wearing safety goggles and a dust mask, was pulling the door apart. He could see the gleam of her tiara, and _knew_ that whatever else happened, she would get him out safely.

“ _No_!” the dragon bellowed as Sheldon dropped the chalk and bolted for the door. “I’m not done with you yet!”

Sheldon vaulted over the dragon’s tail in a display of physical prowess that privately impressed even himself, and threw himself through the widening gap in the door as the dragon’s head whipped around toward him.

“Duck,” Amy said, and Sheldon unquestioningly hit the floor.

Amy’s hand went to her pocket and then swung forward as the dragon reared its head back and breathed in deeply, preparing to bake her to a cinder.

The scalpel that she threw flew up the dragon’s nostril, aided by the speed of its inhalation, and making a nasty squelching sound as it stopped in who knew what arcane bit of draconic anatomy. The dragon went cross-eyed, and then very, very slowly collapsed to the floor.

And when it did, it reverted to human form.

“Kripke?” Sheldon said, scrambling to his feet.

“Kripke,” Amy confirmed.

“But it – he told me to leave the flag! I thought it was Wil Wheaton trying to show off!”

Amy gave him a smug smile. “Oh, no. He just wanted you to think that. But Wil’s your friend now – if he wanted to pick your brain about physics he would have just asked. Kripke’s much more the sort of person to resort to underhanded tactics, like becoming a mythological creature.”

Sheldon felt ashamed. “I’ll have to reinstate Wil on my list. I was _sure_ it was him.”

Amy patted his arm. “I understand. You were in shock.”

“How did you find me?”

“I checked the copy of your enemies list that you shared with me online and cross-referenced it with the list of comments on the _Star Trek_ episode of _Fun With Flags_ , which led me to Kripke. Then I just asked Security if they’d heard any disturbances tonight.”

Sheldon looked down at Kripke’s unmoving body. “Is he dead?”

“No,” Amy said. “I think at worst he’ll have a nasty sinus infection.” 

“How did you know where to… scalpel him?”

“A lot of stories talk about dragons having vulnerable points, but I thought a partial frontal lobotomy was quicker than looking for the _right_ vulnerable point.”

* * *

Amy stepped over the shattered door and retrieved her scalpel, wiping it off on the shoulder of Kripke’s labcoat; she didn’t want to think about what was on it. Kripke just let out a rattling snore. “I think we’ll just leave him for Security to pick up.”

Sheldon caught her wrist as she was about to head back to her lab and pack away her faithful bone saw and trusty scalpel. “Amy…”

“Yes, Sheldon?”

“I think there’s a certain traditional element we’re missing here.” He unhooked her dust mask, fingers brushing through the hair behind her ear, and leaned in close.

“Isn’t the _rescuer_ supposed to initiate the kiss?” Amy said softly against his lips.

Both of them laughing ruined the first kiss, so they had to try again to make up for it, and of course that was when Security arrived, so Sheldon and Amy had to explain what had happened to the door, and the windows, and why there were dragon scales scattered around, and why one of the college’s researchers was lying comatose in front of a very old blackboard.

But when Amy was driving Sheldon home and stopped at a red light, and he leaned over from the passenger seat…

Well, they say the third time’s the charm.


End file.
